Aaron here today with Triple Canopy CFP; Montreal Expozine & Philly Small Press Zine Faire; Moaz Eleman Comics; Ben Jones Interviewed; CAB Photos; Goethe Color Studies
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Canopy Canopy Canopy
Triple Canopy has announced a call for proposals for it’s 23rd issue, Vanitas.
In an age defined by extremes of finitude and excess, deprivation and luxury, what is vanity? How do we register our own transitoriness even as we strive against decay and senescence, by way of cryogenics labs, biotechnology innovations, spa treatments, and the hoarding of material goods and digital files? This issue explores contemporary meditations on mortality as well as the delights, delusions, and pressures of fleshly existence, and ranges from the much-heralded “end of death” to collective processes of aging to the pursuit of impossible—or nearly impossible—forms of beauty. The name is taken from the opulent, hyperrealist still lifes popularized by Dutch and Flemish painters in the seventeenth century, which symbolize the brevity of human life and essential emptiness of earthly pursuits, even as they advertise the artist’s ability to fix time. These paradoxical images prompt us to consider how and why we strive to overcome death while reminding us of our certain mortality.
Apply via the online form. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, November 13, at 11:59 pm EDT. Commission recipients will be announced on December 15.
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Upcoming Shows in N.America
- In Montreal: EXPOZINE 2016
Saturday-Sunday, November 12-13, 11h-18h, free admission. Église Saint-Denis, 454 Laurier E. (main entrance 5075 Rivard, accessible entrance 5050 Berri) - In Philadelphia: Philly Small Press Zine Faire
Saturday, December 3, 12-5pm. Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19147
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Distant Fires: A Sudanese-American ponders how much death a presidential candidate can be responsible for, by Moaz Eleman
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Lines of Thought: An Interview with Ben Jones
– via Nicole Rudick at Hyperallergic:
NR: Do you mean that shows like Adventure Time were created because imagery from the sixties and seventies has become more readily available through sites like Tumblr?
BJ: Contemporary animation like Adventure Time is a complete celebration/homage/furthering of the language that Miyazaki, Crumb, Mœbius, and Disney created.
If you watch that new Werner Herzog documentary Lo and Behold (2016), he interviews one of the three guys who invented the Internet, who says, “The Internet’s all wrong. A hyperlink isn’t a link. You don’t put Nike.com and click on it and it takes you to Nike, I never meant for that to happen.” A hyperlink was excerpting a stanza from Shakespeare, and when you would click on it, you would go to that part of the play. That’s all that hyperlinks were meant to do.
Now, I don’t really care about that, but it shows you that the system of organizing information on the Internet is the Internet. And the fact that we have URLs that are links controls your whole reality, so much so that when you look at how we’re organizing data into platforms like Instagram – I mean, the fact that people are on Instagram all day and not the Internet just shows that how you’re linking to and presenting data is incredibly important. Tumblr was a platform that sped up kids’ understanding what good art was. Now, there are plenty of dolphin GIFs that are shit, but also in three minutes, Johnny Negron — sorry to keep using him as an example — could see every good thing ever made, whereas Chris Forgues and I were lucky to get half of that in our first twenty-four years of life. The Internet is decentralized, but Tumblr is a black hole of curation and appropriation and aggregation. It figured out art. It didn’t figure out the stock market or pornography.
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Some photos from this past weekend’s Comic Arts Brooklyn show, if you’re into that sort of thing
– From the Publisher’s Weekly blog. See if you can spot your favorite cartoonist and/or human being (who attended CAB on Saturday, November 5).
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Via Maria Popova at the Brainpickings blog, some lovely words and images regarding Goethe‘s theory of color.
Goethe believed that there were only two pure colors, blue (“a darkness weakened by light”) and yellow (“a light which has been dampened by darkness”), but he was particularly interested in morphology — the study of forms. His theories of color were also heavily rooted in morphology — from his color wheel, a symmetrical arrangement of six colors against Newton’s asymmetry of seven, to his geometric diagrams of how the relationship between darkness and light shapes color.
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Also, today (Tuesday, November 8, 2016) is Election Day in the United States of America, please vote if you are eligible to do so.